Archives for April 2009

One fun thing about the move is that we get to do a little bit of decorating. I’ve been excited to step outside of the “box” from our usual neutrals and do something different.

Here is the living room. These are the couches that are part of our furnished apartment:

And here it is, after a trip to IKEA:Amazing what a few accents can do! We are very happy with it, it makes this place more “ours” which makes it more home. I am happy that I finally have someplace to read that I can put my feet up!

We have a great picture from IKEA we would like for the wall, but it is 140x100cm and we aren’t sure it will fit in our little Fiat to get it home. We were amazed at what we squished in from this Saturday’s trip!

Well, here it is, my second Saturday in Italy and my first blog post in over a week! I have had a lot less time to post than I thought. If you want more regular updates, I suggest you also read Patrick’s blog, he’s been doing a great job of updating!

What I like so far…

– Patrick and Brandon and Stevie are here! It is fun to have the whole family here together for the adventure.

– Cheese… Mmmmmm… I discovered fresh asiago is amazing, by far my favorite. And grana padano is similar to parmigiano only milder.

– Mornings free – it is nice to get up a bit later, have some personal time in the morning and then walk Brandon to school. They’ve still be pretty busy with appointments for getting things set up, etc. and will be for the next week, but I look forward to when that settles out. I’ll also have Italian two mornings a week.

– Internet! I can’t imagine being this far away and not having a good way to keep in touch. The internet is amazing – we were so happy to finally get it on Wednesday!

– Beautiful place to live. Our apartment is very nice, it will be very comfortable for us and it is in a beautiful place. Right next to a small public park and then one block from the giant Parco di Monza. On Wednesday, it was really warm and sunny so we went for gelato after dinner and then for a walk in the park. Amazing.

– Great people. Everyone we have met is very nice and helpful! The owner of our apartment’s father, who has been handling everything with the apartment, lives right nearby and he has been super helpful. Even took us to a couple stores to show us where they were! The relocation people have been very helpful in getting everything set up. I really like all of the people I work with too!

What has been different…

– Time. Somehow I thought I would have more time! Work has been crazy, probably just some of it being pent up demand – “We’ll work on that when we get there” – but some is just that work is really busy and there is a lot going on. So updates here will be less frequent than I thought, at least for the time being.

– Convenience. Mike, the other engineer who transferred here with me, said “Americans are all about convenience.” It is so true! We are used to 24 hour stores open 7 days a week, an easy process to follow to get something done, automatic garage door openers, anything to make our lives more convenient and save us a little effort. Italy is NOT that way. They are more about quality than quantity or convenience. Some things are just done the way they have always been done. I’m sure there will be more on this later…

– Traffic/Parking. I live 7km (~4.5 miles) from work. It takes me at least 30 minutes door to door from the apartment front door to my office door. That includes handling the garage, driving through all of the roundabouts (which are fun by the way), parking at work and then walking in to the office. In the evening it is at least 40 minutes, up to one hour this week. That is just something to get used to! There are a lot of cars and people here, it’s just the way it is going to be. We chose where we are living based on Brandon’s school and convenience for Patrick and having a nice place to live, not the perfect commute for me. My commute is not bad, relatively speaking, but it is not Corvallis. 🙂 That is something to get used to!

So far, we are all doing well. Brandon is enjoying his new school and adjusting well. He’s a smart, happy kid and seems to adjust to whatever comes his way. Patrick is doing well, learning how to take care of our lives. He has some fantastic Italian meal he’s been searching out the ingredients for that I can’t wait to try! Stevie spends most of his time under the comforter sleeping, same as at home, and comes out at night to make noise and annoy us, same as at home.

Sometimes I can’t believe I’m living in Italy… so much is the same even though so much is different. I’ve been so glad that I had the 3 months of language lessons. I can communicate on a basic level in restaurants and shops. Beyond that I still have lots of work to get more fluent – I listen to the radio and understanding seems so tantalizingly close… I recognize one word in three. All of the connecting words are there it’s just the key nouns and verbs that are missing. But it will come.

If you get a chance, drop us a note! We love hearing from everyone, it makes us feel like we are close by. We are doing well and enjoying ourselves so far.

Thursday Stevie and I made our way over to the apartment in order to officially take possession. I signed a ton of paperwork (all in Italian of course, hopefully I didn’t sign away my firstborn son…) and received a ton of keys. I’ll do a blog entry on the number of keys it takes to live in Italy some other time…

So, I spent my first night in the apartment! It was a horrible night of sleep. I think it was not sleeping well from the jet lag combined with the new noises of an apartment. Nothing obnoxious – just different. Neighbor noises, door noises, birds singing all night long (don’t the birds sleep at night in Italy?).

It is nice to be in our place and start to unpack. My clothes are mostly in the wardrobe and my shampoo is in the shower. Stevie knows where his food and water and everything is. He tentatively explored the place quite a bit. I think he will enjoy looking out the windows, since you can hear so many birds I would assume he’ll be able to watch them too.

Tonight I am going to the store to get some needed items… an iron, a hair dryer, an alarm clock, some silverware, sheets, etc. Oh yeah, and food! And hopefully, a good night’s sleep.

I am in Italy! Stevie (the cat) and I made it to our hotel fine with no major issues. I never in a million years would have pictured that I would take a cat on an airplane, and an international flight at that.

Stevie did really well with the whole thing, it went better than I expected. He really didn’t even meow. We sedated him in the morning and he was pretty freaked out at the beginning. Did you know that you have to take the cat OUT of the crate to go through security? I didn’t! But Portland security is nice to offer a private screening – where we went into a room and I took Stevie out and then they ran the crate through the x-ray machine while I stayed in the room. Stevie has never been happier to get back into his crate! In Frankfurt, I just held him through the security walk through and he did fine.

Stevie in the Frankfurt airport, waiting for our connecting flight to Milan:

They didn’t even want to see any paperwork at customs once we arrived. I was surprised, here we had done all of this work to get the right paperwork, and no one even cared. But if we hadn’t they probably would have wanted to see it, so it’s just as well. I wouldn’t want to start my residency in Italy on the wrong foot. 

The biggest CAT-astrophy (that one is for you Brandon!) was in my suitcase when I got to the hotel. The travel cat litter box had opened and I had cat litter (unused, of course!) all over the suitcase. I’ve got that cleaned up, I’m finally showered and Stevie is hiding under the bed. Maybe he’ll come out if I sit on the bed and watch some TV, but if I do that I might fall asleep.

I need to make it 4.5 more hours to dinner and then I can go to sleep. I’m struggling…

Here is the pile of stuff we are taking with us to Italy, this morning before I went to work:Here is the same pile of stuff when I came home at the end of the day, after the movers were done with it:Today was interesting. A weird day of work and chatting with people. It felt weird to know I would still be working with everyone just not seeing them on a regular basis, just talk with them on the phone. It felt weird as I left the building that I will probably not come back and sit in the building again, everyone is moving to a different building in a few months and our building will be closed and/or rented out sometime in the next year.

Yesterday we went to the coast for a last “hurrah” before the serious packing up begins. It was nice to go to the aquarium and have my favorite beer cheese soup at the Rogue Brewery before we leave. Unfortunately it was a bit chilly and windy for a walk on the beach, at least with the coats we had with us. You just never know with the Oregon Coast! I was inspired with a couple of pics I took yesterday to make this “triptych” with the photos.

Today it was pack, pack, pack all the day long (with a nice little break to go eat Easter ham with our friends Katey and Errol). Now, we aren’t packing everything into boxes, but we’ve had to organize into four categories: Ship, Store, Carry, and Give away. The “Give away” stuff is pretty much gone – except for food and cleaning products. 🙂 We’ve almost moved all of the “Ship” items into one place in our front room. The “Carry” suitcases have almost all been packed to make sure that everything fits and is within the weight limits of the airline.

This last one has been today’s challenge! I have one suitcase that is overweight and oversize and it’s just going to be that way for a $350 fee, because I can’t handle more than two suitcases with the cat. I’m not even sure that I can handle these two suitcases but I will survive from baggage claim to the rental car lot somehow. 🙂

We just took a break to eat dinner and I’ve now backed up our desktop onto the External Hard Drive, so in a few moments I’ll be shutting down the family computer and getting that ready to pack.